Camille Monet (1847–1879) in the Garden at Argenteuil

Camille Monet (1847–1879) in the Garden at Argenteuil from 1876 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows Monet's first wife during the brief period at Argenteuil when the family's domestic life had some measure of stability before Camille's illness became apparent. By 1876 they had been living at Argenteuil for five years, the garden was established, and the Impressionist movement had begun to attract serious critical attention. Camille had been Monet's companion and model since 1866 — appearing in Camille (The Green Dress), Women in the Garden, and numerous garden and outdoor figure paintings — and her integration into his outdoor light studies rather than formal portraiture reveals the special role she played in his developing plein-air practice. The broken-stroke treatment of the garden and figure, which refuses to distinguish Camille's dress from the surrounding vegetation in terms of visual attention, is Monet's defining approach to the figure in landscape: the atmospheric unity of outdoor experience is more important than the hierarchical separation of person and environment. The Metropolitan's holding of this canvas places it in the institution with the largest single Monet collection in America.

Monet renders Camille against the garden's summer abundance through rapid, varied brushwork that captures the flickering of light through foliage. The figure is painted with the same broken-touch technique used for the surrounding vegetation, integrating person and natural environment in a purely optical fusion rather than maintaining the conventional portrait's hierarchical distinction between figure and background.